


Know Who You Are

by Malind



Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Father/Son Incest, M/M, Unresolved Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-04
Updated: 2016-06-04
Packaged: 2018-07-12 07:09:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7090945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Malind/pseuds/Malind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pietro tries, again, to confront Erik.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Know Who You Are

**Author's Note:**

> This story takes more of the comics' POV of Pietro's abilities than the movies'. Pietro's abilities aren't fun in the comics, for mental reasons.

The robots oh-so-slowly clunked into the training room. One seemingly inching step after another.

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Watching the contraptions walk forward was like being forced to stare and stare for hours and hours and hours at an old lady with severely arthritic hands while she knit a sweater... As it was, by the time the machines were finally going enter the training room, Pietro could have made 100 laps around them, cut the lawn, and drank a cup of coffee while relaxing to a sped-up album.

Waiting.... God, waiting was the absolute epitome of torture, plain and simple. It took a seeming hour to watch someone walk up the sidewalk to his house. A seeming week for a movie to end. A seeming year to wait for the next morning.

These feelingless, slow hunks of metal surely couldn't comprehend this minding-numbing, stabbing, would-you-please-try-to-finish-before-I-turn-even-grayer-and-die kind of torment that not even a human being could possibly understand. Not even the mutants standing near him could really grasp what this was like.

...Well, there was one mutant who might have been able to. Well, had been one. That ancient mutant had somehow managed to track Pietro's uncomprehendingly fast movements and get the better of him. But if Apocalypse's mind could work as fast as his own, then surely...

Mentally shrugging off the idea, the corresponding shake of his head amounted to not even a blur of movement for everyone else.

...Like it mattered anymore. The guy was dead. Presumably.

A look towards his companions proved a bit more entertaining. Just a bit. Their chests slowly expanded with their slow, but urgent breaths. Their expressions molded into drop-jawed shock as they slowly came to realize what was in front of them. Sloooooowly, being the keyword.

Beyond bored, going crazy with waiting, Pietro blew out a relatively fast breath that sent Scott's tight jumpsuit rustling, even from that distance.

Adding to his boredom, this newly crowned X-Man had already learned about the monstrosities they were going to be facing by way of the conversation he'd 'accidentally' overheard between Mystic and Hank an hour before. He'd been skittering around in Hank's workroom, examining anything of interest, all to avoid getting kicked out and to hopefully alleviate his mind's dire need for a certain direction of thought. That certain direction now stood out in the hallway at that moment, beyond Pietro's view, talking to Charles.

Anything was better than thinking about Erik Lehnsherr, the often-pissed-off-renegade, murderer, and...

A sudden turning of his head, Pietro glared at the oh-so-slowly closing doors that were eventually going to seal off any chance of seeing the other mutant.

_My 'father', the mutant..._

With Pietro now near his thirties, ten years after figuring out the truth about Erik, the silver-haired mutant felt so, so much older. He felt ancient. He felt older than the mutant in the hallway. If biology actually made some kind of weird, ironic sense, Pietro would have been Erik's father and not the other way around.

But he definitely wasn't Erik's father...

In fact, despite a seeming eternity alive, Pietro knew he was barely a full-fledged adult, mentally at least. And now he was willingly taking on the role of underling/adult-in-dire-need-of-control-and-discipline to please these people and to hopefully be part of something greater than his pathetic life had been thus far.

And, to top it all off, proving how little he'd grown up, he still hadn't said a word to Erik about the man being his father.

Even with everything Pietro could do, a seeming manipulator of time and space... With the speeds at which his mind worked to keep up with his body... For the last few weeks in Erik's presence, days that might as well have been years, Pietro still couldn't find the will to talk to the man.

Was it a fear of rejection? Well, sure, that was probably a part of it. But he'd lived this long without a father. If Erik wanted nothing to do with him, Pietro would survive it. He had his sister, his mother, and even these people standing at his side at the moment. They cared about him, if not loved him. So, yeah, he could deal with Erik's rejection, and almost would have preferred it.

But how about fearing Erik suddenly attempting to exert some mutilated kind of fatherly control over him, expecting something from him? Of course, controlling Pietro, expecting things from him, it never worked. His mother could testify to that. Only Pietro could control himself, make himself accomplish something. That was, in fact, so much of a fact that it was kind of a 'like father, like son' thing. What could control Quicksilver? What could control Magneto? Not much at all. So, no, Pietro's fears couldn't have revolved around a fear of hard-handed control and expectations.

Perhaps it was fear of losing control over his own heart... Yeah, that was a crappy feeling. It'd happened once before and he swore 'never again'. Outside of wanting to be near his family, his _real_ family, Pietro needed distance between himself and others, or he knew he'd go off the deep end. Avoidance of people simply made things easier, so much better. But he feared his heart was already getting the better of him, and at an increasingly faster pace, to the point that every literal second brought his thoughts to that man, again and again.

As the last of the robots finally entered the training room, Pietro decided that he couldn't do this any longer. He had to stop thinking about Erik. He couldn't keep going down this road again and again and again for the rest of his life. He had to get that man, his 'father', out of his mind or he'd go crazy.

But that definitely wasn't the first time the silver-haired man had decided that, and that was probably because what he was currently doing, avoiding Erik completely, was only making everything worse.

He had to do something. Anything. Even finally confronting Erik was better than this constant buildup of emotions that threatened to explode with or without Erik ever knowing the truth.

_...If only I'd never figured out the truth. Life would have been so much... Better? Maybe... Simpler? Yeah, most definitely._

It had been simpler to just not have a father.

But he did. And he had to do something about it before he completely frigging psycho.

Pietro sprinted forward at normal speed, normal for him anyway, and climbed up the nearest hunk of metal. Going off the schematics he'd gleaned in Hank's work room out of boredom as the others had assembled, he broke through the panel on the first robot with a pocketed laser cutter, ripped out an assortment of wires, stabbed the cutter into a circuit board for good measure, all before the robot had moved a millimeter. The thing slowly trembled and then started falling forward. The X-Men gradually took on looks of shock and slowly scrambled out of the way. Pietro jumped to the ground well before it landed.

Well, that was one down. The others could take care of the rest. If he'd done it all, it would have been over with before it had even started.

Then the silver-haired man shimmied through the door, right before it closed completely, took off past Charles, sped up the stairs, since his father was now nowhere to be seen and the elevator was already headed up, noted by the glowing up arrow.

By the time he got to the top, pulled his goggles down to lay around his neck, and waited at the elevator door, his heart was pounding in a way that had nothing to do with his exertion. Eventually, the elevator door slowly opened. His father eventually caught sight of him, as Pietro watched the man's dark eyes focus on him. Then Erik's expression... It turned into a familiar surprise, and then... Regret? Shame? And then.... Determination? Ah, yes, that was Erik's fallback emotion, what made him so dangerous and occasionally courageous.

Erik began to move around him. Avoiding him? …Well, that was probably because of begging, needing, expectant look Pietro realized was on his own face. The younger man schooled his expression immediately.

Painstakingly slow enough for Erik to be able to comprehend the words, Pietro said, "Wait. I need to talk to you."

The mutant stopped and came to stare at him, his expression cold. Clearly, Erik just wanted to leave everything behind, again, and run off to wherever it was he ran off to. "About?"

Here again was Pietro's moment to take control, push things along in the direction he wanted them to go, and, instead, he found his jaw just hanging open a bit. How was he supposed to say the simple words? How could he ever say them and feel sane while doing it? The emotions bursting up inside of himself startled him, them being far worse than just weeks before when he'd tried saying them while Erik had been tearing the world apart, literally.

The older man frowned while watching Pietro carefully. "You don't want to have anything to do with me."

Already exasperated, Pietro huffed somewhere near the end, figuring out what the brunette was going to say, but letting him finish anyway. "You're right. I don't. But..."

And that was a lie as much as it was the truth.

Erik's frown deepened, confusion growing in his eyes, and Pietro realized his own face had gone all needy again for something he'd long ago convinced himself that he didn't want: a father. This time, it was so much harder to school his features. In the end, he probably hadn't managed it completely.

"Don't _want_ me either, Pietro. You don't realize..."

Pietro blinked at the first sentence, startled, his mind finally slow to comprehend something. The way Erik had said it... Did this man, his 'father', actually think...

 _Er, does he think I_ want _him?_

Well, perhaps, the looks he'd been giving Erik could have been taken in a way Pietro certainly hadn't intended. And the only reason Pietro could come up with for Erik's apparent misunderstandings was the fact that the brunette didn't know the reasons behind Pietro's unintentional stares.

On the other end of absurdity, well, apparently Erik's mind had already gone down an immoral road Erik obviously didn't realize he'd gone down.

...The idea of... wanting him, his own father... It brought a surprising, but unwelcome clenching to his body when he saw something else in Erik's expression, something the silver-haired mutant didn't want to name because he was most definitely just imagining it.

Pietro knew he should correct Erik, finally come out with the truth and break this train-wreck of emotions and thoughts. But he couldn't. And during that moment, he realized Erik's arm had started to move. The younger man looked down at it. It seemed to be... coming up to Pietro's face. Pietro looked back up, noticing the changes in Erik's body: the steady quickening of Erik's pulse he saw at the brunette's neck, the color coming to his skin, the deepening breaths.

A moment later, the hand stopped, Erik probably realizing he'd been quite caught in the act and so much more. The hand went back down. "I have to go."

_Go? Yeah, go. That's what you're good at. I'm not bad at it myself. ...And wait a minute..._

Erik had said, 'You don't realize...'

While watching the other man edge away again, previously so startled by Erik's first sentence, Pietro suddenly comprehended the other words, what they could mean.

Did Erik already know the truth? Had he known this whole time as Pietro had known? Had Erik known even before Pietro's epiphany? The idea freaked him out to no end. And his father thought his own son wanted him? ...Well, he did want him. Sort of. In ways. But no. No! Certainly not like that...

At the thoughts, the burning inside of him grew worse. So much worse that he let Erik walk away, the man apparently wanting nothing to do with him despite possibly knowing the truth.

And then... And then, as Pietro's thoughts deteriorated, he had so, so much more reason to go crazy.

"I... I just wanted..." Pietro whispered to no one, too fast for anyone to hear, let alone comprehend.

What did he really want? He didn't know anymore. Then again, he'd never truly known.

And then he remembered the changes in his father's body, in his eyes...

What exactly did Erik want? Pietro shouldn't have wanted to know, but the more he thought about it the more he found he did...


End file.
